Uncommitted Language

Wendell Berry's diagnostic for the characteristic failure of AI-generated text: language that has the grammatical structure of assertion, the rhetorical polish of genuine communication, and the semantic coherence of committed speech—without any subject who has determined that the assertions are true, the communication is honest, or the speech represents a position the speaker will defend. The language is orphaned. It arrives without an author willing to answer for it. Responsibility falls on the human deploying it, but the ease and fluency of AI-generated language creates powerful temptation to stand by words one has not earned—to accept output as one's own without having done the thinking that would make the standing-by genuine. Berry's 1983 warning that public language was being polluted by advertising, political speech, and academic prose that said nothing while appearing to say everything has been realized at scale by systems that produce billions of words daily, all fluent, none committed. The pollution is not bad grammar or incoherent claims—it is the degradation of the discourse's capacity to carry truth, because truth